Review: The Warrior Heir

The Warrior Heir (The Heir Chronicles #1) by Cinda Williams Chima

Young Adult — Urban Fantasy
☆☆☆

In this version of the world, magic is kept secret, but the various factions of magic users don’t work well together, with wizards generally bullying the rest. Sixteen-year-old Jack was supposed to be a Wizard but ended up a Warrior, which is pretty rare and starts causing problems for him.

There are a lot of tropes and cliches here, but I still liked it, if that makes sense. I loved the action scenes and was pulled in by the sense of danger. But sometimes the in-between, character-building scenes were dry and bland. It’s like Chima put them in because they were necessary and spent as little time polishing them as possible.

The ending was rather deus ex machina; I was hoping for something sneakier. But overall I really enjoyed it.

Now, a word about the audiobook. It’s BAD. It’s not the narrator’s fault; he was fine. I blame the sound engineer.



You can hear the narrator’s breathing. It’s constant. Sometimes I thought I heard pages turning. There’s a two-second pause every other sentence for the narrator to breathe. On top of that, there’s a deliberate three-second break in between each track (WTH?) that is also preceded by a loud deep breath. (It sounds like he’s holding his breath!) So every 3-4 minutes, you hear deep breath-silence—and more silence in between. If the sequels are like this, I’m bailing on the audio version.